Dangers Of Factory Jobs

During the late 1800’s and the early 1900’s child labor was a social issue that developed in the United States. In the early 1900’s, so many children ages 16 and under were working in American mine and factories. Our kids should not be forced to work at such an early age, they need education and a good childhood that they will always remember. Some children that are as young as 4 years old are being forced to work in crammed, dangerous factories. These factories are full of poisonous fumes and diseases that can obviously kill. Kids as young as 13 are being forced to work around 13 hours a day. Working these 13 hours is exactly what most adults are working at the time. Kids are also earning a lower wage since they are minors, employers

In a photograph taken by Lewis Hine, he shows us “how dangerous the machines are that the children are working on and that they were practically working inside of them” (Document 8). Being in a room full of dust and sweat, small children could get all of the dust and lint stuck in their lungs. With no windows, this work habit is highly unsafe for the children. It is actually unsafe for anyone who is stuck in a small room with no windows for thirteen hours a day. In the same interview, Elizabeth Bentley was asked, “To explain what she had to do while working in the flax mill” (Document 7). Her answer was, “When the frames are full, they have to stop the frames, and take the full bobbins off, and carry them to the roller, and then put empty ones on, and set the frame going again” (Document 8). A six year old child doing all this work was a disaster waiting to happen because children could easily get hurt or hurt another person.

Conditions of factories were not safe for anyone, let alone a small child. Due to these conditions many children died before their prime. Many children “began work at age 5, and generally died before they were 25” (www.victorianweb.org), America was beginning to lose an entire generation due to these working conditions that so many had to endure. Children were hired at an alarming rate. “In 1870, the first time census reported child workers, there were 750,000 workers in the United States age 15 and under, not including those who worked on family farms or in other family businesses” (“Child Labor in America”), these numbers were not something that was looked over, it astonished many. “A cotton manufactory of 5 or 6000 spindles will employ those 200 children” (Bremner 232). The workforce would continuously grow, hiring more and more children each day. Factories were good for using children as a means of their productivity. “Textile factories, for the most part […] were in the forefront of this industrial revolution, and children formed an essential component of the new industrial workforce” (Bremner 232). Many times without these children working some of these factories would not have survived through the revolution.

“Children worked in very dangerous conditions in the picture represent in document 8” (Document 8). The children working in the factories have to be careful not to get their limbs or foreign objects lodged into the machines. If they got injured or ill and had to miss work in order to properly recuperate. “You are considerably deformed in person as a consequence of this labor? Yes I am” (Document 7), a woman that worked in a flax mill as a young girl was left deformed from all the harsh labor that was forced upon her while growing up. Not only did the parents have to work in order to be able to provide for their family, but their children had to work in order to contribute to be able to put food on the table for the whole family due to the parents lack of pay. “Children were uneducated and were unable to attend school as seen in document 6” (Document 6). Because of the lack of education many adults were illiterate, which caused many problems for example, learning basic life skills would be more difficult and time consuming because people are unable to self-educate by reading informational books on how to acquire basic skills “I am at work in a spinning room tending four sides of warp which is one girl’s work” (Document 1) Children were over worked the girl that spoke in the text about was forced to do the work of four separation girls all in one. Furthermore is unhealthy for anyone at any age

In document E there is images of children working in factories both girls and boys. Children were expected to work under the same conditions as adults. Children had to deal with machines and factories. Child labor population started to grow because the need of help of children in factories made all families involve children into working. Children had to sacrifice their own lives into something they didn't belong to but they still did it to help out their families. This was one of the family worst decision to send children into working because children were working under the same condition as an adult and they did not have any protection. In document F it also shows an image of how unions started to do organizations for workers and children rights. There was 3 unions formed, Knights of Labor, American Federation of Labor, and Industrial Workers if the World. The organizations were meant to help out the workers, women, and children. These organizations started using both boycotts and strikes as strategies to achieve their goal . Their main goals were to give workers eight hours of workday, increase wages, improve working conditions, and put an end to child labor. This topic relates to my next topic because workers and their families were mainly struggling for their low

In 1900, children as young as nine years old were once expected to work sixteen hours a day in harsh conditions. They were useful because of their small size and the owners being able to pay low wages. Child labor laws exist because brave men, women, and children fought for these rights. The conditions of the children’s working environment caused Lewis Hine and the newsies to act upon it.

In this time period, there were many problems in factories. Young children worked long hours in harsh conditions, factories were unsafe and underpaid their workers, and several goods were sold even though they were of bad quality. Document B highlights the horrors of meat factories. It claims that these factories payed no attention to sanitation and produced its products with no regard to quality. Articles such as this one brought attention to these problems and ultimately led to the passing of the Pure Food and Drug Act, which ensured quality and sanitation. Document C brings child labor into question. It states that children working in factories lose their innocence and do not have the chance to be happy. This lead to several laws about child labor being passed but these laws were soon brought into question in the Hammer vs. Dagenhart trial. In Document G, a father challenges this law by stating that Congress has overstepped its boundaries by limiting the exchange of goods made with child labor. This trial eventually sided with the father and removed laws against child labor. Though there was one economic reform that was not permanently fixed, the Progressive Movement was still successful in bringing about major

The picture shows the children not wearing shoes and nor wearing the proper clothing. The machines that they are working on are very dangerous. There is no supervision in the factory and if the child gets hurt, they will either get fired or not get paid, and the thing is, is that it wasn’t illegal at that time. (Document #7)”What time did you begin to work at the factory?” “When I was six years old”.

Kelley begins her persuasion by reiterating the idea of children working “while we sleep” as a way to reveal the horrendous situation the public refuses to correct. Thousands of youths, with ages ranging from six to ten, begin to work as soon as they are tall enough to reach the bobbins, laboring away in unsafe conditions when they should have been in school getting a much-needed education. A regular occurrence for a working youngster would consist of a twelve to fourteen hour day with a one-hour total break for little or no pay. Occasionally, they toiled nineteen hard hours a day and were given the same minimal breaks; though this was a little bit extreme, it was not uncommon for the children who worked in factories. While operating in these unsanitary and hazardous conditions, the young children were more than likely to suffer injuries and illnesses. They

Business owners wanted these poor inexperienced children to work in the mills. (The children who are employed at the factory are very young) (Document #8). Why would someone want young and inexperienced workers at their factory? Instead, they should be going to school to learn how to operate these monstrous machines.

Although this treatment seems inhumane from the perspective of child laborers, factory owners biasedly insisted that children were better off working at factories than staying home. Factory owner Andrew Ure asseverated that he never witnessed any corporal abuse of children (Document 3). He asserted that child laborers showed no traces of exhaustion upon exiting the mills at night (Document 3), making him strongly believe that children thrive better in factories than at home (Document

With the wave of immigration occuring in the years before the Gilded Age, many factories created jobs for all these new immigrants. However, as all of these jobs were for unskilled laborers that immigrated to the U.S., they didn’t pay extremely well, and led most of these workers into poverty. Sometimes, this poverty got so bad that even children of the family between ages 10 to 15 had to begin working for their families. Several problems arise when children of too young age are forced into working, especially when there are no laws correctly restricting the amount and extent of the work minors should be allowed to do. As seen in Document 3, Jane Addams paints the picture of child labor in in Chicago in 1912, in which only one child labor law existed, which only applied to children working in mines to protect them. Although this is great initiative, it does not accomplish much in other fields of work that minors were forced to work in. Because of the lack of child labor laws in other fields, Addams specifically describes a few children injured by a machine at a factory in Chicago. She continues to portray the point that

Business owners never thought that children should have a good education than work at these factories because these factories are actually making them deformed. Proof from document seven says that Elizabeth Bentley’s health changed since she had worked at the factory. “Yes, I was . . . a little [healthy] girl [before I started working at the factory]” (Document #7). This is the downside for working at these places. Even though the factory was producing a lot of product, but at the same time they are turning perfectly normal people into mentally retarded people. Furthermore, this isn’t the only cons about these factories. These factories are making these people work more than an average person would work in the twenty-first century. “[They would work] [f]rom six in the morning till 7 at night” (Document #7). These children are working fourteen hours. A normal person would only work eight hours today. Not only that they get worked to death, they weren’t given much breaks. “Forty minutes at noon [time was given for a break]” (Document #7). Working this long these children should be rewarded with a longer break. See the people who believe that getting short breaks is good; well they are wrong because if you do the same thing over and over it gets boring. Also, your brain will get fried. Case in point, child labor is a torturing practice that needs to get abolished because the working

During the 18 and beginning of the 19th century in certain regions of the U.S child labor made up more than 40 percent of the population (Wolensky). That’s almost half of the working population. Since the beginning of time children have always been known to help their families with domestic tasks. Most of these kids worked in factories because they were easy to control and paid less than adults. Kids earned less than half of what adults made in the work force. In these factories they usually cleaned under and inside machines while functioning because of their small size.. That’s how these kids felt as it was described in a article in our history book. They were always in danger of getting hurt or even dying, which many did. Kids as young

(Laslett, 1970) Coupled with these innovations was the new concept of applying scientific methodology to industrial processes. (Laslett, 1970) All of these changes, while beneficial to businesses, did little to improve the lot of the industrial laborer. (Laslett, 1970) One of the key complaints of an entirely unregulated labor force in the late 1800s was the extensive use and abuse of child labor. In 1870, nearly three quarters of a million children between the ages of ten and fifteen worked in hazardous aspects of manufacturing, agriculture and street trade. (Laslett, 1970) By 1880, that number was over one point one million, or one in every six children in that age group. (Laslett, 1970) By 1900, that number doubled. The conditions under which children worked were very dangerous. They worked the same shifts as adults (about 12 hours a day, six days a week), denying them the opportunity for school and play. (Laslett, 1970) The factories, mills, mines and other work venues in which they labored were unsafe and unregulated. Children were also often used in the most dangerous aspects of industrial work, such as clearing jammed machines or working in confined spaces too small for adults. (Laslett, 1970) In 1881, only seven states had any kind of regulation laws for child laborer. Desperate for money to survive, immigrants and working-class Americans forged